April 2023

UCCS Faculty Representative Assembly Meeting

Friday April 14, 2023

Attendance: Venkat Reddy, Kathy Kaoudis, Nancy Marchand-Martella, Monica Yoo, David Moon, Karin Larkin, Minette Church, Melissa Benton, Matthew Jabaily, Kristi McCann, Lynn Gates, Cortny Stark, Jian (James) Ma, Kate Quintana, Robin Kempf, Aaron Corcoran, Elisa Thompson, Lei Zhang, Larry Eames, Erica Allgood, Gordon Stringer, Craig Bubeck, Haleh Abghari, Farida Khan, Suzanne Cook, Laura Eurich, David Weiss, Suman Lakkakula, Ilaheva Tauone,  Adham Atyabi, Norah Mazel, Curtis Turner, Martin Key, Matthew Beckwith, Mikayla Greenfield, Jennifer Zohn, Assma Sawani, Emily Skop, Emily Mooney, Joel Tonyan, Christine Biermann, David Anderson, Christina Jimenez, Evan Taparata, Marek Grabowski, Genia Olesnicky, Lily Cosgrave, Kimberly Guyer, Beckie Pyles Munoz, Omar Montoya, Eric Billmeyer, Colin Lewis, Angela Bender

Call to Order / Approval of Minutes:

Motion to approve the minutes from March 2023 meeting by Melissa Benton

Seconded by Laura Eurich

Motion passed with 22 approve, 0 opposed and 1 abstention

Reports of Visitors:

Venkat Reddy, Chancellor: 
Thanks for having me here today. Let me start off with an introduction. I want to welcome and introduce Kathy Kaoudis as the new Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance. There were a few other announcements and introductions in the Town Hall yesterday, I won’t repeat those here.

We have exciting news about the new TAAP program, which is the textbook accessibility and affordability program. This is a huge win for us especially now that Barnes and Nobles is dropping universities, which is the case at CU Denver. Our timing was very good, want to give a shout out to our staff for championing. It is good for us and our students.

 There were issues with the election process that impacted the Green Action Fund ballot initiative. Question around this were raised in the second Listening Session. And I just want to clear it up for everyone. Administration doesn't have much of a role in this. It's a really a student driven issue. They have to take a vote and pass it. It's all bound by student government policies. Administration was brought in to ensure the process was followed. That's about it. So sometimes you'll hear this campus is against sustainability or the Green Action Fund. I think Green Action Fund produces really good things on our campus. So please know that administration really just checks the process, but I do have some update on it. The good news is that the system is allowing the students to hold a special election to readdress this initiative, but they need to get it done before the semester ends.

I have held two Listening Sessions so far and some of you may have participated in those. I enjoy hearing from people directly. I essentially asked people to tell me directly, what has gone well? What I need to know that I do not know. And how it is best that I can keep you all informed. I also provided some highlights of campus accomplishments over the past five years. And so from my perspective, I felt like people opened up pretty well and had good discussions. I've got two more sessions coming up. One next week, Wednesday, on April 19th, from 8:00 to 9:30 AM in University Hall, 180, trying to this across the campus and a virtual session on May 3rd. So hope you can make time.

I just want to highlight some of the issues that were raised. I'm not going to capture everything, but some of the issues that we heard is one that came up, which was interesting, is need to work on, appreciation of work between back against that, like what staff think how hard they're working and maybe compared to faculty and the faculty are also thinking the same thing. So I think there should be more and more appreciation of that. Everyone is working really hard to make this available.

There was frustration over the equal pay for Equal Work Act and trust me, I'm also very frustrated, but we do have Angela Bender, who is really taking this on, and I'm really hoping that she's going to bring do some good things there. I also heard the process of hiring was frustrating. Angela and Kathy are going to work on these issues.

In terms of Town Halls and distributing information, I did hear that people do like in person settings to have conversations, so we can directly talk with each other. But virtual sessions, like the town halls, allow us to have anywhere from 300 to 800 people. So perhaps both. There was a concern that the questions are screened. I want to tell you when we have lots of questions, they have to pick ones which will apply to the broader audience, but at least I'd like to believe that the cabinet members are really answering a lot of direct questions.

And of course, budget cuts and impact on people. I do want to say thanks to David Moon, who put together a good list of things we sent to the Vice Chancellors and the Deans and are getting input back from them specifically on two things. We asked: Are you planning on letting any people go? And are you not filling positions that are vacant? We want to understand those two issues and what are the consequences of doing that. So we are trying to be very thoughtful and strategic. The cabinet is going to look at that and see how best we can help because the end of the day, we want to protect people. But we need to be thoughtful and its very tough budget times. So please know that those are the real focus points we're trying to gather along with other strategies they have. But we did share the UBAC recommendations with everyone so they all are keeping those in mind.

Let's see. I did share in the town hall the updates on the various A B C funding scenarios presented to System and the Governor. The funding is closer to C, which is a good thing that's going to reduce the impact on our campus. We did decide on a 5% tuition increase for students and a 4% compensation pool for faculty staff, which includes 3.5% merit pool and half percent compression retention pool. I want to remind you that every 1% equals to $1.1 million. So we give a raise of 1%. We need to come up with $1.1 million in cuts again. So that's the tradeoff but we felt it's important.

On April 18th, the Regents will hold a listening session at their meeting about the concealed carry law and that's going to be a fact collecting session. The Regents will then decide on a plan of action. I did alert the Faculty assembly. They wanted to give feedback on that as well. But that's really not a campus decision. At the end of the day, it is the Regents.

There's also a change in the mental and life insurance rates. If we continue with UC health on this, our rates would have gone up from 7.9% to 12%. Thanks to our system folks working on this carefully, they are going to CVS instead. This means we're going to drop to 3.8% from 7.9%.  So cheers to the system folks for working that out. They're also working on the family leave update. I think the system is going to be doing a plan where they will own it. That means the cost will be reduced to $6 million per year. So there's a lot of reduction of costs.

Each campus will have their own online web and marketing presence. That's the plan as we move forward to ensure that we have common naming provided by marketing teams. So more and more control is going to coming back to the campuses.

Kathy Kaoudis, VC for Administration and Finance:

Hi everybody, I'm glad to be here. I'm really, really happy to be in Colorado Springs. I’ve been in higher education for almost 2 decades before that, I was in the private sector for better decade as a controller and operator. But I really love higher Ed, and I love the passion that we all have for students I taught for about 10 years as an adjunct, so I totally feel pain of part time instructors. I also have always had really good relationships with our faculty council chambers, so we look forward to working with all of you. Just excited to be here. Is there anything else you’d like to know about me?

I have a wonderful announcement. We were able to hire the Associate Vice Chancellor for Facilities and Planning this week. His name is Mark Ferguson. He is coming to us from AECOM, which is an international engineering firm. He is a professional engineer. He has worked in Higher Ed before including at Colorado College in their facilities department. He also has really great experience and the best thing is he's also an alum. His bachelor's degree is from here and has 2 Masters degrees as well. So super excited to welcome him on board. I texted with him yesterday and I had suggested he started on May 1st and he texted me back and said, well, is it OK if I start on April the 26th? He's really excited to be on boarding and started.

He's the one of the two candidates, so I got to see and I was impressed. Yeah. Excited. Think you're going to really like him? He has a. He's just a really calm guy with a really even temperament. And when I called his references, they said things like he was able to resolve conflicts before they turned it. So really happy to hear that. I think it's going to be great.

Nancy Marchand-Martella, Provost:

Everyone hope everybody's doing great this afternoon. I will give you an update on a few of our searches. On the College of Business team with Dean George Reed as search chair, we now have 4 finalists and those finalists will be on campus the first part of May. We are getting all of those interviews set up and of course, we'll announce that to the campus. So that's exciting.

In terms of the Graduate School Dean search, we had 80 applicants. That pool was reduced to 8, which will then be reduced to 3. Dean Kevin Laudner is the search chair and we will be doing those interviews the first part of May as well. So the first part of May is going to be super busy with all of these interviews that we are very hopeful that we will land on a College of business Dean and a Dean of the Graduate School.

We did hire a new Faculty Affairs Coordinator. And we're just solidifying that contract and this individual will report to me in the Provost office and she will coordinate the new faculty orientation. She will coordinate receptions that will be for new faculty or faculty motions and so forth. And so we're super excited about that. One of the things that I do want her to jump on immediately would be to set up some forums and workshops around promoting support for faculty in the classroom. I've been hearing about difficult student issues and this is on my radar, so we want to make sure we're supporting student success, but also supporting our faculty in that endeavor. And we're looking at setting up sort of a forum/workshop format, having legal there and disability support services, the Dean of students among others. We'll get that coordinated. And of course, solicit Faculty Assembly for their thoughts. But I want to get that set up and that would be a part of faculty orientation. But I do know the faculty, no matter how many years there in, should be able to participate.

I have been probably in terms of total amount of time most immersed in our budget redesign model. And I wanted to list all of the Red team presentations that we did as your call.

Red Team is an opportunity for people to poke holes in, you know, play devil's advocate with our new budget redesign. So we met with Dean's council, UBAC, all the financial administrators, the Staff Association, executive members, the Faculty Assembly Executive committee, and then most recently with the Associate Deans, AVC's. At each meeting we learn something new. We've made changes in the budget model based on comments and feedback. I’m impressed by how many people have gotten on the Provost website and have provided comments and suggestions. And we've read every single comment. We read those in our weekly meetings and again we talk through all of those, add aspects to the model that perhaps we haven't thought about. On Monday, we have the town hall related to our new budget redesign model and I encourage all of you to attend. It's from 1:00 to 2:30 this Monday. We do have a live stream of the presentation and question and answer. It will be held in Berger Hall, so you can either attend in person or virtually. And again we really want participation here because this is about us presenting the budget redesigned model and then gathering important feedback from all of you and I highly encourage you to attend in Berger Hall 1:00 to 2:30 on Monday the 17th and again live stream. Chris Valentine will be moderating the events. We're super excited about that.

I am just finishing up all the RPT reviews and I have to tell you that I am very impressed by the teaching excellence at this university ,the research that's being done and the unbelievable service and I mean unbelievable folks are just immersed and trying to make UCCS the best place that it can be. And so I've been totally impressed with the materials that I've been seeing. So it's been certainly great.

And then, just let you know that the upcoming University Affairs meeting next week we're presenting a new certificate. And then the Associate of General Studies, the core degree that Susan Taylor has been presenting in that should be presented as well. So again, partnering with CU Denver on that one. So lots going on in the Provost office. But again, really the majority of my time right now has been immersed in all things budget.

Officer Reports:

Report of the President — Minette Church

Congratulations to Laura Eurich on winning the Faculty Assembly Service Award. Graduations to David Weiss for winning the Student Choice Teaching Award. I want to thank Dale DeBoer for serving as chair of UBAC and to congratulate Christina Jimenez who the Chancellor has appointed us our new UBAC chair. And finally, thank you for David Moon for continuing to chair the Faculty Assembly Committee on the Budget.

The budget redesign town Hall Nancy already talked about. I'll just say that we did meet with the Red team as the Faculty Assembly Executive Committee and in my report I talk about our specific response to that. Some of our comments related to questions related to the metrics for evaluating units in terms of the incentive pool. I want to remind everyone that Project Crest and the Office of Research has been working on how to measure research productivity and how we can keep our status as R2. R2 is measured very narrowly, mostly by OSP dollars and production of PHD's, but we want to float all boats so we need to be sure that we just focus on that narrow definition in our metrics and we them to be reflective of other parts of our mission and values. So I am encouraging people to go to the web page and the redesign group and go to the redesign presentation Town hall on Monday. Faculty assembly has come down and support a broader metrics, but that's still part of the discussion.

Please if you have not already updated your information in Watermark (Faculty Reporting) please do so. This also follows on the comments about how we measure scholarship/creative productivity. So add the information in Watermark with the following kinds of data where applicable. Proposals submitted grad and undergrad, student engagement in research which is a high impact teaching practice which could be again a metric or strengthened programming and peer reviewed and creative work outputs regardless of whether they are granted or contract funded or not or small grant or big grant. You know the more of that kind of thing.

The campus safety weapons policy that the Chancellor already talked about, that's going to be on April 18th. The Regents meeting is going to have that information gathering session. Just to give some context, the court ruled against CU banning concealed carry and 2012, but in 2022, the Colorado Legislature passed a bill that returned authority to set weapons policies to university governing boards. So that's why this is happening now.

Well, there's two important system policies that I attached to my President's report, one is APS 1014 Intellectual Property and Course Materials. And so do take a minute to read those, because they're going to have impacts on us. This policy is very different from the previous version and it discusses faculty intellectual property of course materials and it defines authorship. It also talks about what course materials are and who owns the copyrights and use rights to said course materials and it is heavily changed since I first brought this forward in the fall. I think it has changed in a lot of good ways, but it also puts a lot of onus on primary units, so I think it expects primary units to have a lot of things, for instance, in their bylaws that I'm pretty sure most primary units don't have in their bylaws. So it would be worth looking it over to see what I guess what we should be doing if this goes through as written. The other is APS 5060 on faculty appointments. Please take a look at that, that is faculty titles and appointments and so if you remember, we were talking last fall about they were going to come up with a new IRC title that would be a teaching professor, teaching assistant professor teaching associate. Norah notes that System EPUS just reviewed the draft and the language is currently included for those titles but that it is up to the campuses as to whether to adopt them.

And so there's been a lot of back and forth about that.

 

And that is what I have and the president-elect, Monica cannot be here because she's a conference.

Report of the President-Elect — Monica Yoo—There is a complete ballot and this will be a competitive election. Monica will be sending a link out on Sunday night with the ballot to vote. That will be linked to your email, I believe, so look for that. And you have until Friday at 5:00 PM to vote for our new slate of representatives and officers for faculty assembly Representative Assembly.

Report of the Past-President – David Moon— No report

Committee Reports

Educational Policy and University Standards—No Report due to change in meeting schedule

Personnel & Benefits—No Report

Faculty Advisory Committee on the Budget—I am reporting on behalf of the Faculty Advisory Committee on the Budget. I want to acknowledge a confluence of events that have led to a long term concern that the FACB has had about the way in which UBAC is operated. It is mostly our desire to push it in the direction of being consultative and not just reporting out. It's a multi-year question. And I think we've gone back and forth sometime in the BAM model. We actually voted on some things in terms of a recommendation to the to the Chancellor, we actually voted on some things. And then in other cases, we're hearing about things after they're already settled. But this spring, the challenge has been that the Interim VCAF also had another vice chancellor position and Suzanne Scott, who just you know, does remarkable things and has been the anchor in terms of being able to answer our questions, was unavoidably out for extended period of time. So I understand that the relative lack of specificity in the discussions had some reasons for it. Nonetheless, we had reached a point where we just didn't feel like we have enough information. That's one reason you haven't seen a report about the budget. For me, only one reason it generally too many things. But that's my problem, not, not yours.

So we had actually met before the March meeting. And we went in, you know, ready to talk about some things and in fact, there was more discussion of in this case, of the methodology that was going to be used to distribute whatever the size of the cuts was. So, that was helpful and we learned things you got to understand. I was only knowing what the methodology was because I heard it through the break line and second hand from my being because I happen to be a department chair and sitting. In fact sitting on our council that discusses such matters and so I heard about it, but I got some things wrong and so having the discussion and you back in March was helpful, but we didn't, we didn't really learn anything about how the cuts. How that methodology resulted in different projections for cuts. I mean they described this big matrix that showed the high and low cuts for each college under the different methodologies, but we didn't see it. I had seen it. And on a piece of paper, but we didn't see it as you back. So. So we went into the April session with continuing questions. We met again before that that the April you back on Thursday and we invited Christina.

We aired some of our concerns and she took that in, but we went in again expecting to need to ask a bunch of things and again, as in March, we some of the things that we were concerned about didn't get addressed. Now we asked to see what the actual cuts were to the college is that I mean for faculty, so we care about the colleges, but they're cuts to everybody. But again, I only knew that because I sat in the in the right chair in the College of Public Service, not because it had been shared and you back, or even between beings, they'll problem with sharing things out to the membership between meetings. But those things hadn't happened. So we got agreement that the remaining meetings, there's actually 21 in late April and one in relatively early May. I think it actually falls after commencement.

But then in those across those two meetings, we would get more information about how things have transpired and what the actual consequences there would be finalized in June. So we won't see the very final numbers, but we're asking to see the numbers behind what was happening? I see Christina taking notes. She's ready to make sure we are all on the same page here. So we're asking for those things. It was acknowledged we expect to see those things.

The new thing that we hadn't seen before because we sort of went back to first principles and talked about the size of the cut. So the size of the necessary cut just to balance the books had gone down significantly about half of what it had been in the best case scenario but it had come down significantly. Part of that is that we went from to a from a 4% to a 5% tuition increase. Nobody likes that. But you know, push come to shove and push has come to shove, that was the part of the resolution of that.

Umm, but there are several things that that should be funded, or at least arguably should be funded that we're not included in the mandatory increases. The salaries were in the mandatory increases, but for example the pro formas for new programs.

What are we going to do about the transition in cybersecurity? The Great News is the funding extends for another year, more than we thought it was going to. The bad news is it still ends and we need to figure out do we start saving now to make the transition in a year? How are we going to do that? Because there are tenure track faculty lines, tenured faculty lines that are already in place. So it's not as if we can say, well, the funding grant out too bad, so sad if we are committed to going forward and I just heard it GC that that they're doing stuff right beside the Cyber faculty in the colleges are in fact watching new certificates, doing things that we heard them to do. And they talk about their research and how they're research was going to tie into what they were offering and with that carts working, but it's an ongoing obligation so we'll be working on that. I don't know how that's going to affect the cuts in the coming year. And finally there's the EDI initiative. It so happens that Christina and I had a chat with Rami and they were describing why the funding needs to be a priority because right now the office is sitting on a lot of one time funding, so if you end the one time funding.  It doesn't even make sense to talk about what cut they're taking, because if nobody does anything, they're going to take a huge cut and assets right and positions will be lost and all kinds of things. That's a legitimate thing that we need to talk about. And there was a commitment to talk about those things. So. So the report really is we had a lot of concerns. We voiced some of those concerns. I will say that one way or another, the concerns could reach cabinet and to some extent, they were anticipating the fact that we had these concerns and maybe we had signaled it better in the what would have been February meeting then then we were concerned that we hadn't signaled it. While I'm, I don't know how it came to pass, but things seem to be on a better path and I just want to say that I think Christina brings a perspective about the role of the UBAC chair that is different than we've had, not just in the last chair, but for the last 15 or more years, right, that that you back had had over time changed its purpose. Not in my opinion, for the better, but that had nothing to do with what Dale inherited, right? Dale inherited a UBAC that's very different than the UBAC that we envisioned from the FACB and Christina has expressed sympathy for working towards the vision that we have. That's the end of my report and we're way over time, but I'll take questions or let Steven talk or whatever we need to do.

Christina Jimenez followed up with the following:

First of all, I just wanted to thank you for that part of the last explanation that you were giving David about these areas of initiatives that weren't included in the mandatory cuts. Part of that explanation was also to say that the proposed cuts are going to be larger than the mandatory cuts. So just when you when you know a David was explaining. The rationale for that that we heard at that the Chancellor and the Budget Office presented UBAC yesterday. You know there is good rationale for that, but it is still the idea that the proposal would be more cuts than the mandatory cuts in some ways, although right, you could argue that those are mandatory in certain ways. Anyways, what I want to following up on David's comments is that I'm excited for this new role as a chair of UBAC. I'm also encouraged by Chancellor Reddy conversations about the type of collaboration, communication and transparency that he's hoping to cultivate more. And of course, with this listening sessions and some of his reports were marks today. I don't know if he's still on the meeting.

I am going to try to be reaching out to both the Faculty Assembly Advisory Committee on the budget as well as the Staff Association to kind of gain a better understanding about what people's kind of concerns and ideas are and I think the first step is just as David was mentioning, to try to come to some agreements about a timeline for how and when we're kind of sharing materials and feedback loop.

Umm, you know everything from minutes to agenda setting or asking in {inaudible}, things like that. So we had our first meeting yesterday. I haven't had a debrief with you know Do any of that the chance for any cabinet members and I'm looking forward to doing that and yeah, I mean right now it's going to be a learning curve. I'll do my best these next few months and then next year, hopefully we'll have a kind of maybe a more solid process in place. OK, that's it. Thank you.

Faculty Equity and Inclusion Committee—See Attached

Faculty Assembly Women’s Committee—See Attached

IRC Faculty— No Report

Faculty Assembly Committee on Teaching—See Attached

PRIDE—No Report

Misconduct in Research, Scholarship & Creative Activities—No  Report

Committee on Research—See Attached

Intercollegiate Athletics—No Report

Sustainability—See Attached
Committee on Disability— No Report

Representative Reports—No Report

Unfinished Business

No Unfinished Business

New Business

1. Information item:—Amy Silva-Smith—See attached presentation
   Motion to support this initiative by Faculty Assembly: moved by Cortny Stark seconded by Robin Kempf, 26 votes in favor, opposed 3 opposed support motion passes. More information coming.
    
2. Information item: (1:15-1:30)—Matthew Beckwith and Jim Spice—See attached presentation
    
3. Motion 1: The EPUS Committee moves that the Faculty Representative Assembly endorses UCCS Campus Policy 200-22 IRC Multi-Year Contracts
   Approve 28, Oppose 0, Abstain 0
    
4. Motion 2:  The EPUS Committee moves that the Faculty Representative Assembly endorses UCCS Campus Policy 200-16 revisions to Post Tenure Review
   Approve 23, Oppose 0, Abstain 2
    
5. Motion 3: The EPUS Committee moves that the Faculty Representative Assembly endorses UCCS Campus Policy 200-02 revisions to Academic Year Dates
   Approve 26, Oppose 1, Abstain 0
    
6. Motion 4: (1:45-2:00) “The Faculty Executive Committee moves that the Faculty Representative Assembly endorses the Academic Calendar revision”
   Approve 21, Oppose 2, Abstain 4

Adjourned 1:52 pm

NEXT MEETING Dwire 114 April 14, 2023 12:00-2:00